As the COVID-19 pandemic is spreading and threatening to claim thousands of new lives, more and more regions move to a painful but unavoidable self-isolation regime. That makes it tremendously important for educational organizations of all levels and companies whose employees now have to work remotely from home to rapidly and successfully adapt to distanced interaction. Let’s take a look at a couple of interesting projects that are being developed by resident start-ups at the Ingria Technopark in St. Petersburg.

A company called SpeakerGuru is offering virtual reality (VR) as an environment, in which to remotely train employees in soft skills —a combination of social skills, communication skills, attitudes, career attributes, etc. that enable people to work well with others and achieve their goals.

SpeakerGuru is working on custom VR solutions for professional development based on their multi-user VR technology. The team’s product makes it possible for employees to learn and work together in virtual reality from anywhere in the world simultaneously.

Another start-up, Stories, has come up with a mobile app to assist in training skills required for remote online operation. The team claims the app is easy to use as all the courses are based on adaptive education methods and lessons are put together in the format of short Instagram-like stories. The English-language courses have been prepared by coaches that are reported to have more than 20 years of experience in their field. According to Stories, one of such coaches is a person who has helped several U.S. presidents as they prepared for public speeches.

Stories believes employees who will have completed the courses would find it easier to encourage themselves to work even in the comfort of their homes without getting distracted. It is not only a way of improving the quality of communication within a team, but also a chance of stepping up one’s English language proficiency, the Stories team thinks.